Scratch marks

Coding, writing and make-believe

2021-12-09T09:48:13Z

No, this isn't about fictions we construct about the world through software and stories alike. That's a whole other can of worms. This is about work.

When I first started coding, everyone was telling me to draw a flowchart first, and/or write pseudocode. I dutifully tried doing that, but it didn't seem to help me get any code written afterwards, let alone better code.

Later the UML craze started. The only thing I ever managed to do with UML was tie myself into knots with an overly complex class diagram that never became code either.

In the end I learned to simply write code. Because that's what the computer understands. That's how I progress towards getting the machine to play a game, or solve a problem. Everything else is make-believe.

Planning is good, but it's not actually going out there in the field to do the thing you were planning for.

I tried the same with writing. To draw a map first. Ended up with a nice big universe... that was completely sterile. Only one story ever fell out of it. My first story of any significant length, so that mattered, but I struggled to write it and it showed. I wouldn't let anyone read it nowadays. In retrospect it only worked at all because it mostly focused on one little corner of one world.

I tried again later with the same universe. This time it resulted in a big nice RP that became a novella in turn. And another story by a friend. It was progress, but it still didn't get me far.

Conversely, the universe I have now started with a story. Just one little 1700-word fanfic I started writing on a whim, intent on just going wherever it would take me. That turned out to be a vast playground full of adventure. Go figure.

My old setting isn't gone, mind. It survives in the planet Mir from Parole Planet, and the Dhiira warrior-monks. But that, too, fell flat when I first tried to write a story about the world itself. Sufficiently Advanced Technology came out stilted: another story I wouldn't let anyone read now.

In writing, too, no amount of planning, outlining or worldbuilding can substitute for the actual work of bringing your creation to life. Sooner or later you have to buckle down and just write. A little preparation can help sometimes, but here's the trick: prep work is often invisible.

All those bad old stories I wrote? None of them was wasted; they were all practice, and gave me ideas to reuse.

You don't prepare for a hiking trip by reading travel books and buying ever more fancy gear. Grab any backpack, don an old pair of boots and head outside for a walk just out of town. If something doesn't go smoothly, you can fix it before the next sortie. But only from hands-on experience.

Besides, you need the exercise no matter what. Can't get it any other way.

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On the rarity of wizards in fantasy

2021-05-09T06:17:36Z

Over on the RPG.net forums, there's a thread asking why wizards are so rare in D&D. Of course, as pointed out in the OP, the real reason is extradiegetic (out-of-character in plain English): to keep the setting from turning from faux-medieval into something quite different. But it's fun to consider in-world explanations as well, and plenty of people have pointed out some obvious, plausible reasons.

But my favorite one is by analogy with the real world, and it's so simple: why isn't everyone a programmer on Earth, in 2021? We all use computers all the time by necessity. The required knowledge and tools are free and easy to get by. It doesn't take riches, or a lot of time (though kids get started more easily), and even someone without much inclination can reach surprising levels of skill quickly enough. Yet programmers are very rare, and always in high demand. Why?

Whatever the reason, that's likely why wizards are rare in the Forgotten Realms, too. Or in my pet setting, for that matter.

(Note: we're not talking those settings where wizards are the special envoys of divinity, like Middle Earth, or need a genetic mutation like Harry Potter.)

Conversely, that begs the question of why wizards are so damn common in the Earthsea cycle, where most people know the basics well enough for practical use.

Sadly, the answer is education. We could be living in a world where writing simple scripts is a matter of basic (ha!) literacy. We actually started building that world back in the 80s. Then computing was hijacked by people who wanted these wondrous machines to be appliances, to make most of us dependent on them for software. And so they made programming into this mysterious dark art that only a few "chosen" can master, and even then only at the cost of their sanity.

Spoiler: that was all propaganda. Magic was in us all along.

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Writing with WordGrinder

2020-05-05T05:10:54Z

For the longest time, I've been typing my prose into plain text files. That has a lot of advantages: they can be opened with pretty much anything, they're as compact as files get without compression, and can easily be turned into web pages or e-books through Markdown. Next time however I might just try to use WordGrinder instead.

Wait, what? WordGrinder (available from cowlark.com and various Linux distributions) is a word processor in the old sense of the term, from before humongous office suites became the norm: a program designed to let writers write, with as little fuss as possible. You get a word count (and paragraph count), formatting roughly on par with the aforementioned Markdown, a decent range of import and export options, and a spellchecker. That's it!

More importantly, you get all that from a program not one megabyte in size with all dependencies, that can run in terminal emulators (and X11). Talk about software you can install on toasters! For someone like me, who uses computers so ancient that even AbiWord has noticeable overhead, it's amazing.

Even better, WordGrinder has some unique and valuable traits. Also some quirks, but for once they're part of the charm here.

The biggest one is that WordGrinder supports multiple documents in a single file: an obvious thing to have, yet for some reason I can't think of any other except Sigil, which uses EPUB as its native format (but isn't nearly as good at simply letting you type, and can only import or export HTML).

Also, the user interface is minimal but not simplistic, and uses modern, familiar key combinations. Hitting Escape opens a small menu system you can then navigate with the arrow keys (but not the mouse), or with the shortcuts it shows you. There are pretty, visible indicators for the start and end of a document, and the cursor always stays in the middle of the window. That kind of wastes space and reduces the amount of context when you're writing as opposed to editing, but it makes sense and has charm. Which seems to matter.

Last but not least, WordGrinder's native file format is text-based and human-readable, so if you ever find yourself stuck with a bunch of .wg files and no ability to run the software that made them, it should be easy to recover the data. Well, in principle the same is true of LibreOffice. Whose .odt files WordGrinder can import just fine, by the way. It seemed to choke on HTML at first, until trying to export instead revealed the reason: you have to make it a complete XHTML document instead. In other words (ha!) the raw output from Markdown doesn't work, but a part from an EPUB file should.

All right, that got very technical very quickly, and I should wrap up this review anyway. Which by the way I'm writing in the software it's about, and it's working out very well indeed. So maybe give it a try if you can, yes?

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